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Trans-Texas Travels
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Circling Mules in Austin

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox
Marshal Johnson survived several scrapes with hostile Indians in West Texas and later in the badlands of the Dakotas, but after he and the Wild West had both settled down considerably, he sure got skinned when he bought a span of mules in Austin.

Born Sept. 7, 1848 in Cumberland County, NC, Johnson moved with his family to Macon, MO in 1853 and from there to Texas. The Johnsons first settled near Greenville, but in 1862, they moved west to sparsely populated Tarrant County.

“We lived at this place [a few miles south of Fort Worth] until I thought myself a grown man,” Johnson later wrote, “and in 1867 I went west as a cowboy.”

Following a couple of close calls with Indians, Johnson decided to “quit the frontier” while still possessing his scalp. He moved back to Fort Worth for a time before getting four years of schooling at Cleburne.

In 1890, he traveled to Dakota Territory. Based on his experience fighting Comanches in Texas, the Army hired him as a scout for 7th Cavalry and on December 29 that year, he witnessed the infamous Wounded Knee massacre. Soldiers killed some 150 Indian men, women and children while 25 troopers died. That bloody incident, Johnson wrote, finally broke him of his “wild desire for excitement” and he returned to Texas.

Possibly because his younger sister Mattie lived in Austin, Johnson settled there after giving up his civilian job with the military. He and his wife and their daughter Elvira had a house at Watters Park, a railroad stop in northern Travis County long since absorbed by the suburbs of the capital city.

Johnson worked as a section foreman for the railroad. His sister’s husband, Adolph Wilke, also had a railroad job. In the summer of 1897, Mattie gave birth to a son they named Leroy.

When the Spindletop oil field blew in near Beaumont in 1901, Johnson moved there hoping to capitalize on a boom that saw cash flowing like so much black crude. After the drilling activity lulled, the Johnsons returned to Austin.

He operated a mom and pop grocery store at 4403 Avenue B in the capital city’s new Hyde Park development. (The Johnsons lived in a house next door.)

By then, the Wilkes had moved to Ballinger, but in the summer, young Leroy would return to Austin to stay with his mother’s parents, who also lived on Avenue B. That’s when Johnson became an important figure in Leroy’s life.

Avenue B extended to the northern edge of Austin, giving Leroy plenty of open country to roam. Now around 12, he learned to shoot from his uncle. Happily for a young man with a new single-shot .22 Quackenbush rifle, a state-maintained slaughter pen near 45th and Guadalupe attracted hundreds of pigeons.

“We had pigeon pie nearly every Sunday,” Wilke later recalled.

While it was natural enough for an old Indian fighter to teach his nephew how to shoot, Johnson influenced Wilke’s later career as a newspaperman and writer. Among his other skills, Johnson could set type and probably helped Wilke get a job with an Austin printing firm as a printer’s devil, melting lead type for reuse. Later, Wilke operated his own modest print shop for a time.

In 1914, Wilke used his uncle’s typewriter to peck out a joke he sold to Holland’s Magazine for 25 cents, the beginning of a 70-year writing career. Published in Dallas, the magazine paid him in postage stamps.

Well into his 60s, Johnson bought a farm off Manchaca Road, just north of what is now Ben White Boulevard. Wilke spent the summer of 1914 working on his uncle’s farm.

In those days, farmers relied heavily on mules for plowing and hauling. For what he must have considered a bargain price, Johnson bought two mules from the Butler Brick Company, located where Zilker Park is these days.

Mules are famously contrary, but the span Johnson purchased soon proved to be the motor vehicle equivalent of lemons. When Johnson tried to use them for plowing, all they wanted to do, no matter the level of invective and other inducements directed toward them, was walk in a circle.

The mules would at least haul a wagon, but even then they could not be trusted.

One day, Wilke drove a wagon downtown to sell a load of hay. He tied the conveyance to a hitching post near the city hall at 8th and Colorado and then walked downhill to Congress Avenue. When he came back he discovered the mules had gotten loose and pulled the wagon down Colorado Street toward the river.

Wilke managed to get the contrary mules under his control, sold the hay, and took the proceeds back to his uncle.

Turned out that the mules had spent most of their lives hitched to a rotating spar, walking in circles around vats to stir the clay mixture used to make bricks. That’s why the mules had become just about as set in their ways as the bricks they had helped manufacture.


© Mike Cox - April 9, 2014 column
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